Force.com Application: Transactional email solution?

We are in need of a solution to send our transactional emails from our force.com application. Examples include when an item has been entered, a payment made, etc. We can no longer use the core SFDC functionality as we exceed the limits.

Does anyone have any recommendations on the best solution to use that:

1. Allows fields to be pulled from Standard and Custom Objects and incorporated in the emails?2. Can be tracked in Salesforce3. Fairly easy to create / include templates4. Can leverage workflow / triggers to send the emails

This isn't an email marketing solution but a solution that would enable us to send emails to customers as different actions occur. For example, something like Mandrill or SendGrid.

If you wish to build this same within salesforce, you can write triggers on the objects (actions performed - insert/update/delete of records) to send emails at specifc actions : sample code available on the following link:https://help.salesforce.com/apex/HTViewSolution?id=000181297&language=en_US

You can use Exacttarget to fire emails off from Apex code within Salesforce but just a word of warning Exacttarget doesn't create email interactions on the contact/lead if you do it this way. You will need to configure Exacttarget to fire emails based on its own trigger rules based on Exacttarget pulling a report from Salesforce. Not very elegent but you can do it.

I am looking to do something similar, we are sending our ecommerce data into Salesforce but want the data to be sent to Exact Target so we can send Transactional emails within 3 -5 minutes of receiving an order.

Radnip you mentioned the following: You will need to configure Exacttarget to fire emails based on its own trigger rules based on Exacttarget pulling a report from Salesforce. Not very elegent but you can do it.

Do you know the best way or recommend a way for Exacttarget to pull a report from Salesforce automatically, or is it better for Saleforce to export the data to an FTP Location and have Exact Target pull the file from the CSV?

Does the email HAVE to go via ExactTarget? as you could just use regular workflow emails in Salesforce. But you can also write a Salesforce Apex Trigger to fire the email to ExactTarget, I've done that. The only downside is ExactTarget will not push the activity back into Salesforce (to see email open/clicks etc).

Native salesforce functionality won't work if you ware sending emails to non-users and need to send a large amount (limits depend on your version) since half of our emails need to go to non-users we had to look for something else.

We are in the process of implementing ExactTarget and I do have to say it has not been easy, though I believe it will be very powerful once we have it up and running.

MassMailer can fulfil your requirement. It can be easily integrated with Salesforce platform and you can utilize workflow and triggers. MassMailer Make Salesforce Email Limitations a Thing of the Past. You can track your emails ,save and edit email templates on Salesforce when using MassMailer. By monitoring the performance of your email templates, you can optimize your past templates to improve results and avoid creating the same template more than once. Save time and get better results with MassMailer.